How can I make my thesis more discoverable? 

Your eThesis has many benefits compared to simply lodging a printed copy in a library. The online version will potentially attract a wider readership than the printed copy alone, which would only be available to those with access to one of the university libraries. Making research available on the open web also has the potential to increase your visibility as a researcher.

UDORA is the University of Derby Open Research Archive, an Open Access institutional repository containing the research output of University of Derby staff and students. For more information about UDORA, please look at the UDORA section on the Open Access Libguide.

Whilst Derby is not a traditional research university, its staff are nonetheless generating a large amount of material that is worth drawing the attention of the wider academic community. In addition to published journal articles, many repositories - of which there are over 2,100 around the world and 200 in the UK alone - contain PhD theses, conference and workshop papers, datasets, unpublished reports, working papers etc.

Institutional repositories serve to make your research output accessible to a much wider audience than via the traditional route of publication in an academic journal. Whilst this is obviously important to enhance your credibility and reputation as an academic and researcher, your work is necessarily limited to those who subscribe to the publication - and in some cases this may be a very select group. Studies have shown that there is often a direct correlation between Open Access and citation hits.

An institutional repository makes your work available to anybody who is interested. Most institutional repositories are also registered with Google Scholar, SHERPA and OAIster, making your research much easier to find.

There are also benefits to students, as the Library may not subscribe to all the publications your articles have appeared in. Uploading your work to UDORA means that students have the ability to read and learn from all of your research output.

Institutional repositories also have an important role to play in preserving scholarly content that may otherwise be out of print or unavailable. As the onus of collection and preservation is on the University, you no longer need to worry about updating broken links or tracking which databases your articles may be hosted on in order to maintain access.

An institutional repository such as UDORA also gives you the ability to disseminate material that may not be suitable for publication in a traditional journal. However, all material intended for submission must still have undergone some form of critical review process to ensure that all material available for access under the University of Derby name adheres to the same high level of quality.

Any queries relating to UDORA, contact the Publication Practice Librarian, Holly Limbert.